28 Quotes by Patrick McGrath

Our conversations were like sex, our sex like conversation.

Isolated people, those who live alone, are always conscious of their condition in the homes of families.

What I most fear is that they think me frail. Frail! It is a word that I hate. Call me mad, if you must; but never frail.

Perhaps that's the whole point about infidelity, I suggested, not that one has sex but that by doing so one puts at risk someone else's happiness?

For despite his confidence, and his apparent maturity, I suspected that there was in him a deep and childish need to elevate, and idealize, the love object. This is not uncommon in artists. The very nature of their work, the long periods of isolation followed by public self-display, and the associated risk of rejection all conspire to create unnaturally intense relationships with their sexual partners. Then, when disillusion occurs, as of course it must, the sense of betrayal is profound...

Nobody touches you after seventy except doctors, as a rule. A sister, if you're lucky enough to have one. Undertakers.

She's a tall skinny old girl in a tweed jacket and brown corduroy trousers, long restless hands stained yellow, rings on every finger. Hair tied up in a bandanna and clear, fierce blue eyes like mine. You'd know us anywhere as brother and sister, lanky, beaky customers with these piercing eyes and silver hair.

We see nobody clearly. We see only the ghosts of absent others, and mistake for reality the fictions we construct from blueprints drawn up in early childhood. This is the problem.

A tissue of small sounds filled the room, a bird, a clock, a voice from another garden. What we call silence.